Rabbit at rest (62 page)

"Well, you can say that, but
he
can't pay it back, and
he was acting as part of the company."

"What about the lot? Why can't you sell the lot? That much
frontage on Route 111 is worth a fortune; it's the real downtown,
now that people are scared to go into the old downtown because of
the spics."

A look of pain crosses Janice's face, rippling her exposed
forehead; for once, he realizes, he is thinking slower than
she is. "Never," she says curtly. "The lot is our number-one
asset. We need it as a base for Nelson's future, Nelson's and your
grandchildren's. That's what Daddy would want. I remember
when he bought it after the war, it had been a country gas station,
with a cornfield next to it, that had closed during the war when
there were no cars, and he took Mother and me down to look at it,
and I found this dump out back, out in that brambly part you call
Paraguay, all these old auto parts and green and brown soda
bottles that I thought were so valuable, it was like I had
discovered buried treasure I thought, and I got my school dress all
dirty so that Mother would have been mad if Daddy hadn't laughed
and told her it looked like I had a taste for the car business.
Springer Motors won't sell out as long as I'm alive and well,
Harry. Anyway," she goes on, trying to strike a lighter note, "I
don't know anything about industrial real estate. The beauty of
selling this place is I can do it myself and get the salesperson's
half of the broker's commission. I can't believe we can't get two
for it; half of six per cent of two hundred thousand is six
thousand dollars -all mine!"

He is still playing catch-up. "You'd sell it - I
mean, you personally?"

"Of course, you big lunk, for a real-estate broker. It
would be my entrée, as they call it. How could Pearson and
Schrack, for instance, or Sunflower Realty, not take me on as a rep
if I could bring in a listing like that right off the bat?"

"Wait a minute. We'd live in Florida most of the time -"

"Some
of the time, honey. I don't know how much I could
get away at first, I need to establish myself. Isn't Florida,
honestly, a little boring? So flat, and everybody we know so
old."

"And the rest of the time we'd live in Ma's old house? Where
would Nelson and Pru go?"

"They'd be
there,
obviously. Harry, you seem a little
slow. Have you been taking too many pills? Just the way we and
Nelson used to live with Mother and Daddy. That wasn't so bad, was
it? In fact, it was nice. Nelson and Pru would have built-in
babysitters, and I wouldn't have to do all this housekeeping
by myself."

"What housekeeping?"

"You don't notice it, men never do, but there's an awful lot of
simple drudgery to keeping two separate establishments going. You
know how you always worry about one place being robbed while we're
in the other. This way, we'd have one room at Mother's, I mean
Nelson's - I'm sure they'd give us our old room back -
and we'd never have to worry!"

Those bands of constriction, with their edges pricked out in
pain, have materialized across Harry's chest. His words come out
with difficulty. "How do Nelson and Pru feel about us moving
in?"

"I haven't asked yet. I thought I might this evening, after I
ran it by you. I really don't see how they can say no; it's my
house, legally. So: what do you think?" Her eyes, which he is used
to as murky and careful, often blurred by sherry or Campari, shine
at the thought of her first sale.

He isn't sure. There was a time, when he was younger, when the
thought of any change, even a disaster, gladdened his heart with
the possibility of a shake-up, of his world made new. But at
present he is aware mostly of a fluttering, binding physical
resistance within him to the idea of being uprooted. "I hate it,
offhand," he tells her. "I don't want to go back to living as
somebody's tenant. We did that for ten years and finally got out of
it. People don't live all bunched up, all the generations, any
more."

"But they do, honey - that's one of the trends in living,
now that homes have become so expensive and the world so
crowded."

"Suppose they have more children."

"They won't."

"How do you know?"

"I just do. Pru and I have discussed it."

"Does Pru ever feel crowded, I wonder, by her
mother-in-law?"

"I wouldn't know why. We both want the same thing - a
happy and healthy Nelson."

Rabbit shrugs. Let her stew in her own juice, the cocky little
mutt. Going off to school and thinking she's learned everybody's
business. "You go over after supper and see how they like your
crazy plan. I'm dead set against it, if my vote counts. Sell off
the lot and tell the kid to get an honest job, is my advice."

Janice stops watching the microwave tick down its numbers and
comes close to him, unexpectedly, touching his face again with that
ghostly searching gesture, tucking her body against his to remind
him sexually of her smallness, her smallness fitting his bigness,
when they first met and still now. He smells her brushedback
salt-and-pepper hair and sees the blood-tinged
whites of her dark eyes. "Of course your vote counts, it counts
more than anybody's, honey." When did Janice start calling him
honey? When they moved to Florida and got in with those Southerners
and Jews. The Jewish couples down there had this at-rest
quality, matched like pairs of old shoes, the men accepting their
life as the only one they were going to get, and pleased enough. It
must be a great religion, Rabbit thinks, once you get past the
circumcision.

He and Janice let the house issue rest as a silent sore spot
between them while they eat. He helps her clear and they add their
plates to those already stacked in the dishwasher, waiting to be
run through. With just the two of them, and Janice out of the house
so much, it takes days for a sufficient load to build up on the
racks. She telephones Nelson to see if they're going to be in and
puts her white cardigan back on and gets back into the Camry and
drives off to Mt. Judge. Wonder Woman. Rabbit catches the tail end
of Jennings, a bunch of twitchy old black-and-white
clips about World War II beginning with the invasion of Poland
fifty years ago tomorrow, tanks versus cavalry, Hitler shrieking,
Chamberlain looking worried; then he goes out into the dusk and the
mosquitoes to stack the already wilting brush more neatly in the
corner behind the cement pond with its fading blue bottom and
widening crack. He gets back into the house in time for the last
ten minutes of
Wheel of Fortune.
That Vanna! Can she
strut! Can she clap her hands when the wheel turns! Can she turn
those big letters around! She makes you proud to be a
two-legged mammal.

By the end of the Cosby summer rerun, one of those with too much
Theo in it, Harry is feeling sleepy, depressed by the idea of
Janice selling the house but soothed by the thought that she'll
never do it. She's too scatterbrained, she and the kid will just
drift along deeper and deeper into debt like the rest of the world;
the bank will play ball as long as the lot has value. The Phillies
are out in San Diego and in sixth place anyway. He turns the TV
sound way down and by the comforting shudder of the silenced
imagery stretches out his feet on the Turkish hassock they brought
from Ma Springer's house when they moved and slumps down deeper
into the silvery-pink wing chair he and Janice bought at
Schaechner's ten years ago. His shoulders ache from all that
pruning. He thinks of his history book but it's upstairs by the
bed. There is a soft ticking at the lozenge-pane windows:
rain, as on that evening at the beginning of summer, when he'd just
come out of the hospital, the narrow room with the headless sewing
dummy, another world, a dream world. The phone wakes him when it
rings. He looks at the thermostat clock as he goes to the hall
phone. 9:20. Janice has been over there a long time. He hopes it
isn't one of those coke dealers that still now and then call, about
money they are owed or a new shipment of fresh "material" that has
come in. You wonder how these dealers get so rich, they seem so
disorganized and hit-or-miss. He was having a dream in
the wing chair, some intense struggle already fading and
unintelligible, with an unseen antagonist, but in a vivid domed
space, like an old-time railroad terminal only the ceiling
was lower and paler, a chapel of some kind, a tight space that
clings to his mind, making his hand look ancient and strange
- the back swollen and bumpy, the fingers withered - as
it reaches for the receiver on the wall.

"Harry." He has never heard Janice's voice sound like this, so
stony, so dead.

"Hi. Where are you? I was getting afraid you'd had an
accident."

"Harry, I -" Something grabs her throat and will not let her
speak.

"Yeah?"

Now she is speaking through tears, staggering over gulps,
suppressed sobs, lumps in her throat. "I described my idea to
Nelson and Pru, and we all agreed we shouldn't rush into it, we
should discuss it thoroughly, he seemed more receptive than she,
maybe because he understands the financial problems -"

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, it doesn't sound so bad so far. She's used to
considering the house as hers, no woman likes to share a
kitchen."

"After she'd put the children to bed, she came down with this
look on her face and said there was something then that Nelson and
I should know, if we were all going to live together."

"Yeah?" His own voice is still casual but he is no longer
sleepy; he can see what is coming like a tiny dot in the distance
that becomes a rocket ship in a space movie.

Janice's voice firms up, goes dead and level and lower, as if
others might be listening outside the door. She would be in their
old bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, Judy asleep beyond one
wall and Roy behind the wall opposite. "She said you and she slept
together that night you stayed here your first night out of the
hospital."

The spaceship is upon him, with all its rivets and blinking
lights. "She said that?"

"Yes she did. She said she doesn't know how it happened, except
there'd always been this little attraction between you two and that
night everything seemed so desperate."

A little attraction. He supposes that was fair, though tough. It
had felt like more than that from his side. It had felt like he was
seeing himself reflected, mirrored in a rangy young
long-haired left-handed woman.

"Well? Is she telling the truth?"

"Well, honey, what can I say, I guess in a way -"

A big sob: he can picture Janice's face exactly, twisted and
helpless and ugly, old age collapsing in upon her.

"- but at the time," Rabbit goes on, "it seemed sort of
natural, and we haven't done anything since, not even said a word.
We've been pretending it didn't happen."

"Oh, Harry. How could you? Your own daughter-in-law.
Nelson's wife."

He feels she is beginning to work from a script, saying standard
things, and into the vault of his shocked and shamed consciousness
there is admitted a whiff of boredom.

"This is the worst thing you've ever done, ever, ever," Janice
tells him. "The absolute worst. That time you ran away, and then
Peggy, my
best
friend, and that poor hippie girl, and
Thelma don't think for one moment I didn't know about Thelma
- but now you've done something truly unforgivable."

"Really?" The word comes out with an unintended hopeful
lilt.

"I will never forgive you. Never," Janice says, returning to a
dead-level tone.

"Don't
say
that," he begs. "It was just a crazy moment
that didn't hurt anybody. Whajou put me and her in the same house
at night for? Whajou think I was, dead already?"

"I had
to go to class, there was a quiz, I wouldn't
have gone ordinarily, I felt so
guilty.
That's a laugh. I
felt guilty. I see now why they have gun laws. If I had a gun, I'd
shoot you. I'd shoot you both."

"What else did Pru say?" Answering, he figures, will bring her
down a bit from this height of murderous rage.

Janice answers, "She didn't say much of anything. Just the flat
facts and then folded her hands in her lap and kept giving me and
Nelson that defiant stare of hers. She didn't seem repentant, just
tough, and obviously not wanting me to come live in the house.
That's why she told."

He feels himself being drawn into alignment with Janice, against
the others, with a couple's shared vision, squinting this way at
Pru. He feels relieved, beginning already to be forgiven, and
faintly disappointed.

"She is tough," he agrees, soothingly. "Pru. Whaddeya expect,
from an Akron steamfitter's daughter?" He decides against telling
Janice, now at least, how in making their love Pru had come twice,
and he had faintly felt used, expertly.

His reprieve is only just beginning. It will take weeks and
months and years of whittling at it. With her new business sense
Janice won't give anything away cheap. "We want you over here,
Harry," she says.

"Me? Why? It's late," he says. "I'm bushed from all those
bushes."

"Don't think you're out of this and can be cute. This is a
hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same."

"We never are," he dares say.

"Think of how Nelson feels."

This hurts. He hadn't wanted to think about it.

She tells him, "Nelson is being very calm and using all that
good psychological work they did at the treatment center. He says
this will need a lot of processing and we must begin right now. If
we don't start right in we'll all harden in our positions."

Rabbit tries to conspire again, to elicit another wifely
description. "Yeah -how
did
the kid take it?"

But she only says, "I think he's in shock. He himself said he
hasn't begun to get in touch with his real feelings."